The Edinburgh Film Festival was 40
years old in August, and nostalgia was coming out of the woodwork. Tributes
were penned, tuckets were sounded, haggis was
downed. There was dancing in the streets, bagpiping
in
the projection rooms and a celebration docu­mentary called Hooray for Holyrood(rhyme with Hollywood), being Edin­burgh's oldest precinct and
containing HolyroodPalace, where Mary Stuart loved
and lived. And for its main movie retrospective, Edinburgh dug deep into the
past to retrieve The Ghost Camera (1933) by David Lean's
favorite Thirties filmmaker, and the man who gave him his first editing job,
Bernard Vorhaus.

Lean dropped the name
casually – as one often drops bombshells – in a British TV interview, but
suddenly every critic in England was scurrying to his reference books and
every archivist to his vaults: Vorhaus, B., born
1905 in New Jersey....made low-budget action pics
and thrillers in Britain and America....was named in the HUAC hearings as a
communist sympa­thizer....career ended in 1952 when pro­jectionists union
threatened to blackball all United Artists films if Vorhaus'
work was shown...silent ever since.

Someone had the simple
idea of look­ing up V for Vorhaus in the British
phonebook – and there it was. Bernard was alive and well, lived in St. John's Wood, North London, and had been
enjoying a pros­perous second career as
a house
con­verter. Soon he was up in Edinburgh, aged 81, a spry codger unfazed by
sudden fame. He enjoyed re-seeing many of his movies and walked out of the
ones he didn't enjoy. He also dropped startling hints that he might set up
another project.

Vorhaus fanciers, like
festival director Jim Hickey, insist that his movies are not masterpieces,
and even Lean would prob­ably agree. But they are outstandingly well-made B-pics and quota quickies. A Sam Fuller before his time, Vorhaus made a tiny budget and a tinier schedule go a
long way, not least in his best movie The Last Journey (1935). This is
as good a train romp as The Lady Vanishes. The all-sorts characters –
a newlywed bigamist (Hugh Williams) and his unsuspecting bride, a
doctor-hypnotist bound for a vital operation (Godfrey Tearle),
a temperance worker, a detective disguised as a drunk, etc. – climb onboard
an express which happens to be in the hands of a driver who wants to murder
his co-driver. The driver is also on his last journey before retire­ment, and
what the hell does he care if the locomotive, stoked with his fury, picks up
speed and is soon slamming through the English countryside threatening cows,
milk trains, and startled passengers wait­ing vainly on station platforms for
a train that doesn't stop?

Briskly funny and
exciting, masterfully dovetailing the plots and subplots as apoc­alypse
approaches, Vorhaus' film could have taught the
Seventies' disaster genre a thing or two. The director does less well with
the love-and-avalanche plot of Dusty Ermine (1936), and Crime on
the Hill (1933) is a potty whodunnit crossing Aga­tha Christie
with P. G. Wodehouse. Bodies thud and wills are
read in a never-never English village. But even here Vorhaus
shows a cracking sense of humor, managing to parody a dated genre almost
before it was dated – watch the montage of gaping faces whenever Something
Dra­matic happens.

Three movies from Poland grabbed the political
limelight at Edinburgh. Krysztof
Kieslowski's No End is banned in the Eastern Bloc. The authorities
won't bear a film whose dead lawyer hero (played by JerzyRadziwilowicz, Wajda's
Man of Marble) looks on approvingly from beyond the grave as his plucky widow
(GrazynaSzapolowska)
carries on his battles against the state. Plain but piquant – the
"ghost" motif is surreally matter-of-fact, not fey or winsome – the
movie's plot is enriched by its range of characters, embracing every flavor
of political response. The widow fights the good fight on behalf of
persecuted Soli­darity workers or political dissidents, despite learning more
than she wants to know about her husband's sexual past. And her two lawyers,
her husband's ex­colleagues, are a grimly comical Tweedledum and Tweedledee. One
is an old compromiser who'd rather buy a deal with the judge than champion a
losing cause or client. The other is a glitter-eyed young ideologue who'd
rather see a client die on a hunger strike than recant a protest or plead not
guilty.

Kieslowski's first
film, the black-and-white Camera Buff,shimmied deftly through the ambiguities of life under
total­itarianism. But No Еndadds
color, literally and figuratively. The guiding hand reach­ing out to the
heroine from the next world – the husband steps in to influence events at
times – is presented as a beatific alter­native to the steering hand of the
State, reaching deep into people's homes and souls.

Neither Roman Wionczek'sDignity nor KazimierzKarabasz' A Looming Shadow measures up to Kieslowski. But
yoked together as a mandatory double bill they make intriguing viewing. (Poland won't allow the
second to be shown with­out the first as an ideological counterweight). Dignity
is an anti-Solidarity tract masquerading as a film. Its lone and aging
hero (JerzyBraszka), a
factory worker who won't be bullied into going on strike, is the shining
knight of the state-approved union up against the Solidarity renegades. At
the end the hero is wheelbarrowed out of the
factory by his bullying workmates and dumped outside the gates. The bruised
fighter for status-quo socialism, who only wants to support his family and
his right to work, glowers back at the massed ranks of nasty radicalism. The
audience feels it ought to be booing or hissing as if at a pantomime.

A Looming Shadow whacks this rub­bish
so firmly over the head that the dou­ble-bill idea, from the Party's
viewpoint, seems self-defeating. A 60-year-old retired electrician,
splendidly played by the pachyderm-like Marius
Dmochowski (Poland's Jean Gabin), comes
to Cracow for a banquet honoring the 30th anniver­sary
of the building of the Nova Huta steelworks, in which
he took part. Medals are dished out all around, but he doesn't get one. Why? Whodunnit? Is there a for­gotten (by him) but unforgiven blot in his past? Prowling through dark
corridors of power, the film depicts Eastern European bureaucracy as a maze
of conspiracy and obfuscation. Even with a sword for defi­ance and a ball of
thread for finding your way back to daylight and honesty, you won't go
through this labyrinth without meeting the Minotaur at least once, maybe
fatally.

British cinema, too, is
doing its bit in the age of paranoia. Absolutely everyone feels he's being
got at in Mike Newell's The Good Father,a tale of sun­dered parents and tug-of-war kids.
Chris­topher Hampton adapts the novel by Peter Prince, and Anthony Hopkons grabs
the plum role of a 50-ish South Londoner who's split up with his wife,
resents her monopoly of their young son, and seeks vicarious revenge. He
steers a similarly plighted friend (Jim Broadbent) through the law courts, to
sue for custody of his (Broadbent's) son.

Moral squalor reigns –
the lawyer they hire is an oily upper-class thug (Simon Callow) who smears
Broadbent's wife by citing her student-demo past and her les­bian present –
and Hopkinsdevours
every morsel of cynical dialogue. But excitable critics who claimed Newell to
be a master of sleaze on the strength of Dance with a Stranger should
take a look at this picture and think again. It is grungy without style. Shot
for Channel 4 televi­sion, it looks every inch a TV movie, all 20 inches grainily expanded to 2000. Hopkons,
though,
is a treat.

I have been subject to
several assassina­tion attempts in the UK since writing the
article "The Brits Have Gone Nuts" (Film Comment, August 1985). But
I still think British cinema is suffering an epidemic of self-mortification.
Sometimes this can be fun, as with Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy,which shows the Punk Era
throwing up all over the sceptered isle – ghastly
but funny. But there are also hard-labor mov­ies like Michael Caton-Jones' lugubrious Riveter,a NationalFilmSchoolfeaturette
about a father and son who leave Glasgow to start a new life
in the Scottish isles, meeting woe, misery, and rain in much the same measure
as before. Or like Ann and Eduardo Guedes' pseudo-picaresque Rocinante,in which John Hurt traipses across
Britain and is astonished to learn that the place is sick, stricken, and full
of class schisms.

Once again, Edinburgh rounded up choice
items from the East. They also threw in mini-tributes to two direc­tors, one
dead, one very much alive.

The deceased director
is Filipino Gerardo De Leon, whose rip-roaring
adventures in diverse genres – musicals, comedies, gangster films – survive
in dodgy prints, some of which sear the ret­ina. The black-and-white
compositions of 48 Hours (1950), a prison-break drama, invite
comparison with Raoul Walsh and Fritz Lang.
Unfortunately, I had to leave after 70 minutes due to incipient blind­ness.
But I enjoyed what I saw and heard.

The alive filmmaker is
writer-director-producer-star Jackie Chan, heir to Bruce
Lee as Hong Kong cinema's reigning
hyphenate. Chan has more humor than Lee (who wasn't slow with a gag himself),
and his 1983 comedy-action romp Project A outdoes Lee in most other depart­ments, too. Visual gags vie
with thumping fight scenes and heart-stopping action stunts – all the latter
performed by Chan himself, including shinnying up a swaying 50-foot flagpole
to release his manacles. Nothing like the rapturous groan of collec­tive
vertigo that went through the audi­ence at this point had ever been heard in Edinburgh before.

Up the hill, in the
auld town near the castle, sits one of the world's few surviving cameraeobscurae.From a periscope mounted
on a roof, a 360-degree image of the city in motion – traffic, buildings,
people, scudding clouds – is reflected onto the "screen" of a
circular white table. Hickey has made much of Edinburgh, which is unique
among film fests – part of a larger
festival of art, music, ballet, opera, and theater. JerzyRadziwilowicz can take time off from scorching
audiences in Andrej Wadja's stage version of Crime
and Punishment to drop round to filmhouse as
the star of Krzysztof Kieslowski's No End.Cross-media electricity crackles. Four decades in the
business have not dented Edinburgh's variety and
vitality.